Today I bought a game with a weird history. Once upon a time Stardock promised to make the best fantasy 4X turn-based strategy game since Master of Magic, and they called it Elemental: War of Magic. The game released, and it was a complete disaster, full of bugs, bad user interface, and severe flaws in the core gameplay. Although some of the problems were fixed with patches, the game never got anywhere close to living up to the hype. So to make up for War of Magic, Stardock made a much improved sequel in Fallen Enchantress and even gave the game for free to early registered buyers of War of Magic.

While I am a big fan of turn-based strategy games, I had gotten word of the Elemental controversy in time to not buy War of Magic. My idea at the time was to wait for the game to get patched. As no miracle patch emerged, I never played War of Magic. And I was sufficiently skeptic of Fallen Enchantress to not buy it on release, but put it on my Steam wish list instead.

It turns out that Steam has a nifty feature that if a game on your wish list is on sale, they send you an e-mail. Until tomorrow Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is 66% off on Steam. At that price I'm quite willing to risk it. Now I just need to find the time to actually play it, as it appears to be rather epic in scope.